Who’s Gathering the News?

As we have said countless times, most of what we do is not primary news reporting. Every once in a while we break a story based on first-hand accounts, but most of what we do is commentary on the news. For that, like all commentators, we rely on others for the primary function of gathering and reporting the news.
Sadly, the news-gathering function has been corrupted in recent years, as sources like the Associated Press have been drawn into editorializing rather than reporting. Another negative trend is the financially-driven downsizing of news-gathering operations across all of the mainstream media, from television to newspapers to magazines. The latest sign of this trend is the leaked proposal for CBS News to outsource some of its news-gathering to CNN:

CBS, the home of the most storied news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its newsgathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday.
Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS